It was a very great and sincere pleasure to me to see the thing repeated--with somebody else as victim.
We made Natchez (three hundred miles) in twenty-two hours and a half-- much the swiftest passage I have ever made over that piece of water.
The next morning I came on with the four o'clock watch, and saw Ritchie successfully run half a dozen crossings in a fog, using for his guidance the marked chart devised and patented by Bixby and himself.

This sufficiently evidenced the great value of the chart.
By and by, when the fog began to clear off, I noticed that the reflection of a tree in the smooth water of an overflowed bank, six hundred yards away, was stronger and blacker than the ghostly tree itself.

The faint spectral trees, dimly glimpsed through the shredding fog, were very pretty things to see.
We had a heavy thunder-storm at Natchez, another at Vicksburg, and still another about fifty miles below Memphis.

They had an old-fashioned energy which had long been unfamiliar to me.

This third storm was accompanied by a raging wind.